Rotary floor machines for cleaning, stripping, and buffing floors are well known in the art. Such rotary floor machines utilize a disk designed to accomplish the specific task at hand. The disks are generally annular planar disks that are adapted to be releasably coupled to the driving unit of the rotary floor machine.
Many of the disks are brushes that have tufts of bristles that are arranged on a face of the disk for contact with the floor. The tufts are disposed within bores on the disk. Generally, the bores are arranged in specific patterns depending on the desired characteristics of the brush. A typical pattern is the arrangement of bores in graduating circles about the center to the periphery of the disk.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,678,529 issued to Woods et al. on Jul. 25, 1972, the tufts of bristles are disposed in bores that are arranged in annular patterns. The bores are perpendicular to the plane of the disk face and, thus, the tufts are also perpendicular to the plane of the disk face.
In U.S. Pat. No. 2,291,740 issued to Menkhaus on Aug. 4, 1942 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,181,193 issued to Nobles et al. on May 4, 1965, the tufts are likewise arranged in circles about the disk. The bores of the innermost circle are substantially perpendicular to the plane of the disk face, while each outwardly adjacent ring of bores are gradually outwardly angled. This provides an outward flaring of the bristles in order to enable the brush to reach beyond the circumference of the supporting disk.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,114,225 issued to Malish et al. on Sep. 19, 1978 a brush-like mounting device for rotary pads is disclosed. The mounting device includes rings of bristle tufts. In one embodiment, the tufts are gradually radially outwardly angled in outwardly adjacent rings. In another embodiment, the tufts angled radially inwardly, with radially outwardly adjacent rings of tufts gradually transitioning to radially outwardly angled tufts.
While these brushes are suitable for certain purposes, it has been found that the prior art rotary brushes lack in effective cleaning of tile floors, and more specifically of the grout characteristic of tile floors. Because the grout is below the surface of the tile, it is especially difficult to clean.
Such brushes as are known, including those described above, will flare outwardly upon use due to the weight of the machine and the rotation of the brush. Thus, the bristles are all generally oriented in one direction.
There are known special tile floor cleaning machines that utilize a cylindrical brush. However, this requires a separate machine to clean the grout.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a grout cleaning brush for a rotary floor machine in order to eliminate the need for a separate machine when cleaning tile and grout floors.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a brush for a rotary floor machine.